Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Bush Budget Priorities: Bombs, Not Bread & Education

As George Bush drastically cuts funds for education, food stamps and hunger programs, healthcare for sick and disabled veterans, environmental protection, our National Park System, grants to hire police officers, housing and heating bill assistance for the poor, even an 83% reduction in funds to improve our nation's crumbling dams and water systems.......From Common Dreams, here's one of Mr. Bush's spending priorities.....WASHINGTON -- February 8 -- The New York Times reported Monday that U.S. scientists "have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say." [See: www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020705B.shtml]

From Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which focuses on nuclear policy, said today: "While the U.S. turns its sights on Iran, accusing that country of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, U.S. nuclear weapons spending has quietly grown by 84 percent since 1995 -- several years after the Cold War ended. This year the U.S. will spend nearly $7 billion to maintain and modernize nuclear warheads, usable for decades to come, and many billions more to operate and modernize its delivery and command and control systems. Altogether, the United States is spending about $40 billion annually on nuclear forces. Ten thousand nuclear warheads, with some 2,000 on hair-trigger alert, remain in the U.S. arsenal, each one many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped 60 years ago."